My Experience as Youth Pastor

So there are a broad spectrum of parents in the world, but on one end you will find parents that think their kids are perfect no matter what and on the other end you will find parents that don't care one way or the other. I have kids from both categories. Each come with their own kind of problems. There are a lot of different ways the kids can turn out too.

For example, I have a kid that is practically perfect in every way as far as the family is considered. This results in the child generally expecting to get whatever the child wants. The child is generally good though and works very hard to actually meet the expectation of being perfect with no real consequence of failure. I think this is the best case scenario with the dynamic because there is a desire to excel. I think this is generally because that child already has a desire to shine and so the family has just seen the good even in the bad.

Another child is in a similar situation, but has no drive to do anything. The mother, the only family in the picture, ignores any fault and assumes her baby is in the right regardless. This feeds the minor character flaws and grows them into fissures of selfishness.

Then you have the other end of the spectrum with parents that just don't care. Once again this manifests differently depending on the child.

I have a teen that desires love from parents but gets nothing. This teen went through a very difficult period of self destruction trying to get the attention desired and nothing. Fortunately this was brought to a happy end and now this teen does everything asked, but it is obvious that it is all about getting the love of a selfish mother. This situation breaks my heart, but the end result at this point has become a very well adjusted kid despite life situations. My biggest concern would be long term problems leading back to the self destructive behavior.

Finally there is the other side. Kids with no motivation and parents that don't care. I have a couple from the same family. They are surprisingly similar and only show up on occasion. Socially I'm more concerned about them than anyone else. They simply don't care about anything. It is disturbing and probably has a Latin name with a very long dissertation explaining the disorder. The shorthand is sociopath. Well, the one is just anti social, but the other leans much more strongly to sociopath. This one lies about everything, and I mean everything. We went on a trip and the kid started telling everyone about my plans for some big thing. When it got back around to me I started tracing it back to the original source. It was this kid and when pressed for who said anything about this nonexistent event the answer I was given was that I had told the kid all about it. It was just disturbing to watch a kid lie with no possible basis for reality and not exhibit any classic signs of the lie.

Generally I think that the parents are the root of the major problems. The imperfections and faults are amplified by the parents disregard for basic parenting. The parents will then blame anything on everyone else. This is a very troubling pattern that is overtaking, or rather has overtaken our country. This is why people sue over every little thing. I remember a story about a mother that was suing the state of Missouri for wrongful death of her son. He had been in prison 3 times and she fought to get him out every time. He was killed by an officer during an armed robbery attempt and she blamed the state. One of the claims that that her son was still suppose to be in prison when he died and if he had been in prison he wouldn't have gotten involved in the armed robbery attempt that resulted in his death.

Seriously, you can't make this stuff up, this is all kinds of crazy and I don't really even know how to cause the change that needs to happen for some of these kids. Without the parents joining in it exponentially increases the difficulty of helping them out.

Any ideas?